The Daily Fuckup

By July 5, 2017, the White House’s long-promised effort to rip up and replace the Affordable Care Act was still trapped in the kind of legislative limbo that makes a presidency look both overconfident and underprepared. After weeks of public pressure, repeated promises, and a lot of ceremonial chest-thumping, Senate Republicans had pushed the health-care drive into the post-holiday stretch because they still did not have a clear path to passage. That delay was not a sign of momentum. It was an acknowledgment that the votes were not lined up, the internal disputes were not going away, and the bill remained vulnerable to failure if it ever reached the floor. What had been sold as the signature domestic achievement of the Trump presidency was starting to look less like a grand legislative offensive than a long demonstration of how quickly a party can tie itself in knots. Each passing day made the process look less disciplined, less coherent, and less like a governing plan than a scramble to avoid public humiliation.

The underlying problem was not merely that the Senate had run out of calendar space before the holiday. The bigger issue was that Republicans were trying to force together a bill that satisfied factions pulling in opposite directions, and the arithmetic kept refusing to cooperate. Conservative lawmakers wanted something that went much further in undoing President Barack Obama’s health law, while moderates worried that the proposal under discussion would cut too deeply into coverage, especially for low-income Americans and people in states heavily reliant on Medicaid. Some Republicans feared the political consequences of weakening protections for people with pre-existing conditions. Others complained that the draft still did too little to erase the law they had spent years attacking. That left leadership trying to build a majority out of pieces that did not fit neatly together. The result was a plan that seemed to change depending on who was talking, with no version strong enough to settle the argument. The holiday break did nothing to fix the math; it simply bought time for lawmakers to return to the same standoff after a few days away from Washington.

Trump’s own posture added to the sense of confusion. For months he had treated repeal as a test of party loyalty and as proof that his political style could force Congress into line. He had repeatedly suggested that getting a deal should be easy if Republicans would just stop hesitating and get behind him. But that message ran headlong into the realities of Senate procedure and the stubborn refusal of his party to agree on what kind of bill it wanted to pass. By early July, the president was being forced to adapt to the possibility that his top domestic priority might fail on his watch. In one sense, his willingness to say that it would be acceptable if the bill did not pass was an attempt to lower the temperature and recast the fight as a matter of flexibility. In another sense, it was a public retreat from the certainty that had defined his campaign-style pitch on health care. The shift did not make the situation look stronger. It made the weakness more visible. A president who had promised to repeal and replace Obamacare was now preparing the country for a possible collapse because his own party could not produce a bill it could live with.

The political damage went beyond one bad week on the Senate schedule. Republicans had spent years telling voters that the Affordable Care Act was a failure and that they would come up with something better, cheaper, and more workable. By the middle of 2017, they were instead mired in an exhausting cycle of draft, backlash, revision, and more backlash. Every new version of the legislation seemed to invite fresh criticism from somewhere inside the party, while the delays made the whole operation look increasingly chaotic to the public. Democrats had little incentive to help rescue the effort, since the longer Republicans fought among themselves, the more the party looked unable to govern even on an issue it had made central to its identity. Even if Senate leaders eventually found a way to force a vote, there was still no guarantee the bill would survive, and no guarantee that a replacement would emerge with a cleaner political story after all the intraparty warfare. At that point, the health-care crusade had stopped looking like a bold opening act for the Trump presidency and started looking like a liability that exposed the limits of his influence, the fragility of his coalition, and the gap between the promises he made and the legislation Congress was willing to pass. For a White House that had built so much of its brand on the idea of winning fast and winning big, the summer fight over health care was turning into a long, public lesson in what happens when the votes simply never appear.